Take this post for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1ll6ocg/see_it_say_it_censored_kneecap_is_not_the_story/
Speaking from experience, people in Ireland are overwhelmingly pro-palestine.
There is this user in the comments: https://www.reddit.com/user/EntireCourage308/
Its a nearly year-old account, it started posting about a month ago, it made some innoculous posts, then pivoted to posting far-right misinformation in the r/northernireland subreddit.
There’s loads of other accounts just like it.
Yes it takes very little searching to find this shit on reddit.
But - and I’ll probably get tons of downvotes, but still: the Fediverse is not safe from this.
edit: considering our APIs are free & open it could even be easier, esp. if you don’t want to leave a money trail
edit2: I definitely don’t mean to diss the Fediverse in any way! It stands sky high against walled-in platforms. Just stay vigilant and real. This is not paradise.
Nothing can be prevented entirely online, but empowering users with the tools to choose their own experience and tailor their feed with the communities and users they choose themselves is a giant step in the right direction.
Reddit chose the path of consolidation and central control, and the results were inevitable.
It really isn’t, even on my instance used by like… 3 or 4 actual people so far, I have had more than enough spam accounts - and those were relatively harmless. Support the server admins and mods of the servers you are on/communities you are in, if able, they are the ones who are engaged in cleaning up incursions like it. Oh, and report things.
For what it’s worth, I do believe the Fediverse has higher resilience, thanks to a different culture, decentralised nature (with helpful platforms like Fediseer) and a lack of the “we just need numbers as big as possible for our investors to be satisfied”-incentive to tolerate anything that looks like engagement.
Its easier to spot here, and since we’re split up into small severs, its easier to moderate.
It’s super easy to spot on reddit. Even easier than that?
There clearly aren’t that many bots (of all kinds, incl. humanoid) in the Lemmyverse (yet), so I guess they stand out more, but beyond that?
Hm. How so?
I learned early that admins (and possibly also mods) have more insight into user behavior, is that what you mean?
Beyond that the mod/admin structure is pretty much the same as on, say, reddit.
No place is safe from this until we are forced to log into the internet with IDs issued by a global government. And obviously that’s a hideous nightmare of its own. and still not a solution.
Anonymity online is important to preserve.
But it’s also the source of so much unchecked bullshit, cheating, exploitation, manipulation, etc etc etc. And now with stronger AI in the mix, it has also made everyone paranoid, only wanting to trust old accounts, calling everything they disagree with a bot, etc.
In short, the internet was a mistake. A big huge self inflicted, unavoidable, and necessary mistake.